Jaela Daran
Jaela Daran was the Speaker for the Silver Flame during the Thrane Civil War and the End War. She escaped the sacking of Flamekeep and the fall of her kingdom at the hands of the Gith by traveling the realms with the help of the Lich-Lord Vecna. He showed her the secret paths through the multiverse to Earth, a realm hidden and protected from the Githyanki, where she would remain in self-imposed exile for many decades. The Path to Exile Even though she would later be regarded as one of the greatest Speakers in the history of the church, Jaela's early life in Thrane was fraught with failure and tragedy. At the age of four she fell ill to a terrible darkness that sapped her strength and threatened to stop her heart dead. The attending clerics were only able to save their Speaker by replacing her heart with the Heart of Vecna at the direction of High Cardinal Krozen. Jaela would survive, but the operation forever changed the young Speaker; turning her eyes from blue to a bright violet, darkening her hair, and slowly pulling her alignment toward Neutral Evil. As she grew older Jaela began to see the corruption that had invaded almost every level of her church, perpetrated by Lord Marshall Blackburn and High Cardinal Krozen. Only a child of seven but with the voices of Tira Miran and Vecna counseling her, she began to take back her kingdom by reestablishing the Knights of the Silver Flame. Jaela, Marshal, Mia, and the Wraith traveled across Khorvaire searching for powerful artifacts tied to their shared history that would help them cleanse and retake the Kingdom of Thrane. When Jaela exited the Twilight Demesne a fully realized Speaker, having magically aged ten years in the Feywild, she returned to Flamekeep only to discover a schism had split the church between the ministry and the military. High Cardinal Krozen had declared her a false Speaker and implied she had abandoned the voice and teachings of Tira Miron. In return Jaela revealed that Lord Marshal Blackburn was actually a Death Knight named Soth who had been turning members of the military into a council of Undead Paladins. With powerful members of the church on both sides of the conflict and no clear resolution in sight, the Thrane Civil War began in the late summer of 999 YK. The Thrane Civil War Though the war would technically only last a handful of months, in that short amount of time the conflict would shake Thrane society to its core. The Knights of the Silver Flame were instrumental in bringing Krozen and Blackburn to justice. While Jaela, Mia, and the clerics bravely defended Flamekeep from a northern assault, Marshal and the Wraith went on the offensive to assassinate Soth and his remaining Death Knights one by one. Unfortunately Thrane's enemies would not idly sit back and watch from the sidelines as the kingdom tore itself apart from the inside. So on a cold night in autumn as Jaela's forces prepared to repel an attack from the north, the rival kingdom of Karrnath invaded from the east with an army of warforged and undead. Caught off guard, Jaela was forced to order a full retreat from the capital city and evacuate her citizens south to Sigilstar. The losses, both civilian and military, would bring an end to the Civil War as a greater enemy arose to unite the divided nation. The Fall of Thrane Jaela's final defeat would come only weeks later during the following siege to retake the capital city from the hands of the Karrnathians. During the initial assault as the two armies clashed outside the gates of the city, four Githyanki Man-O-War Spelljammers suddenly appeared in the sky and began to indiscriminately strafe the battle below. Before she could react and call a retreat Jaela found herself suddenly surrounded by Gith hunter-killers appearing from nowhere. The assassins would have killed her then and there if Mercy had not arrived in the nick of time. However, the appearance of a silver dragon drew the attention of the Githyanki Warships who began to focus their fire on the young speaker and her companion, forcing her to flee from the battlefield. Outgunned by an extraplanar enemy, the only person Jaela could turn to for guidance was Vecna; who had traveled across all worlds and had seen the outer realms with his own eye. Vecna informed her that the Githyanki were a psionic warrior-race, who viewed the Silver Flame as a twisted abomination of raw psionic power. He suggested that with her army broken and her kingdom invaded from two sides she was unequipped to deal with the Githyanki threat, and worse; if they caught and killed her their silver swords would sever the connection between Speaker and Flame, forever extinguishing the holy fire. Her only recourse then, he told her, was to flee the realm altogether and find a place where the Gith could not go. Conveniently Vecna knew of such a place and promised to guide her there under the condition that they go immediately, without informing the other Knights of the Silver Flame. He explained that if the Knights knew where she was they could be captured by the enemy and her location extracted from their minds without the need for interrogation or torture. Torn between protecting the Flame at the cost of her friends and her kingdom, or fighting on and nobly dying on the battlefield against overwhelming odds; Jaela, a child of only seventeen, cracked under the strain and decided to flee. She barely escaped the Gith in the fog over the Mournland and in an act she would later come to regret for hundreds of years, she lept from the back of her dragon into the Glowing Chasm at the urging of Vecna and dissappeared from the realm of Eberron. Without a Speaker, a capital city, or an army to defend her borders, Thrane slowly collapsed during the following winter as the Gith continued to assault any remnant of the Silver Flame. When spring came months later and the snow melted there were no great cities left standing in the Kingdom of Thrane, and as the years stretched on into decades, the holy Silver Flame faded from memory to myth. Life in Exile